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Bennet’s Self-Inflicted Wounds

By the lights of meta-pollster Nate Silver (you can read his election forecasts in the New York Times online), Michael Bennet will lose the November election.

Silver’s analysis has Buck with about an 80% probability of winning the race at press time. There will be much hand-wringing in the aftermath of Bennet’s defeat. But, in large measure, it will have been a self-inflected wound.

Twenty-two months ago, we wrote “Bennet, by stark contrast, has little in the way of connection with traditional Colorado. Never elected by Colorado voters to a lesser post, he is the first electoral novice to be a Colorado Senator in more than a generation. It’s difficult to see Bennet’s natural affinity for Gunnison ranchers, or Yuma sugar beet farmers, or even union pipe fitters in Adams County.”

>In the end, the Washington-centric Bennet never adopted a Colorado message, or drove home a connection with voters, particularly the suburban folks who are decisive in statewide elections.

Moreover, Bennet contributed to a dangerously toxic environment nationally with his own votes and stances. Persistent high unemployment and anemic economic growth and negative average real wage growth will kill even more strongly rooted candidates.

Part of a small group of Democrats, Bennet forcefully advocated for an economic stimulus package of less than 800 billion dollars. Yet the output gap (the delta between what the economy could produce, and what it would produce) at the time argued for a stimulus of around 1.1 to 1.2 trillion dollars, half again larger than what Bennet advocated for in the Senate. The result is that the stimulus was not large enough, particularly to offset the spending cuts in state and local government, and the economy has never regained its footing, killing investment and wage growth. Some may argue that outcome could not have been foreseen. In fact, it was, and numerous observers, including many who predicted the economic crash, argued for a larger stimulus with a much more direct fiscal punch (and maybe payroll tax relief). I personally handed Bennet a scatter plot graph at a meeting early in 2009 clearly delineating the historical relationship between the output gap and unemployment, which strongly indicated the need for a larger stimulus. Alas, the graph, and the commentary of a large number of economists, was insufficient to move Bennet.

Later that year, Bennet would vote against “cramdown” legislation that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to write down mortgages, as they can all other types of private debt. There are many arguments about the moral hazards created by “cramdown,” but the practical effect is clear as day in hindsight. Rather than focusing on the negative impacts of the financial crisis in a narrow window of time, and making banks, already bailed out, propped up and subsidized by free money from the Fed, the housing crisis has painfully lingered on. Each foreclosure has created more negative equity for other homeowners, crippling the collective balance sheets of millions of consumers. That has slowed consumer spending, forced hundreds of thousands out of their homes, and devastated neighborhoods with abandoned properties. Again, Bennet had voted with Wall Street and against Main Street Colorado. As Wall Street filled his campaign coffers, the Colorado housing industry, one of the mainstays of our economy and the one most resistant to outsourcing, has limped along, contributing to unemployment and forcing budget cuts at the state and local level, which in turn has further slowed the economy.

Lastly, and most obscurely, Bennet supported the so-called Coburn amendment, which prohibited the Federal Communications Commission from even talking about the “Fairness Doctrine,” a hoary old regulatory device that required those who use the public airwaves to provide “equal time,” a quaint notion that both sides of an issue should be given an airing. The Coburn amendment, named after the fairly right-wing senator from Oklahoma, immediately chilled the debate over the need or even the desirability of having fairness on the public airwaves. As a result, media has become even more polarizing, and the national debate has drifted farther from fact-based moorings, and the amount of vitriol attacking Obama— on issues as spurious as his birthplace and his religious loyalty— have poisoned the climate to the point that candidates like Bennet have a nearly impossible task translating reasonable policy positions into arguments relevant to average voters. Had Bennet championed opposition to the Coburn amendment, the result certainly would not have been a utopian vision of media balance and informed debate. But, inevitably, the message sent would not have been one embracing the purely nonsensical status quo epitomized by the teary-eyed Glenn Beck.

The lesson is as clear as the poll numbers. Tacking right, then left, while moderating purely for the sake of moderation and abandoning sound policy ultimately makes for poor politics. Bennet, indeed, had the potential to shake up Washington. In the end, we are left with an object lesson that may not be broadly learned.